BI Testing

BI Testing:

Imagine tasks of a sales head of a big company selling different goods across country. There can be multiple software applications which maintain data about the products, sales numbers, sales schemes, product stock, customers, distributors etc across different regions. In order to effectively plan and implement sales strategies he needs to have thorough insight into this huge chunk of data. He need to view data in different forms like comparative analysis, graphs, charts, summaries, trends  and so on to get the necessary intelligence and take informed decisions.
Data warehousing and Business intelligence solutions (DW-BI) address this need to EXTRACT data from multiple data sources, TRANSFORM it into the required structure and LOAD into the target database for creating different types of reports.
This entire ETL process (Extract, transform, load) and the reports need to be tested thoroughly to ensure that the end users are easily getting right data in right format as and when required,  for effective control on their business processes. This is called Business intelligence testing or BI testing.
First part of BI testing is checking correctness of ETL process.

A data can be extracted from multiple data sources like different RDBMS  or files. In Extract process, it is required to test how the data sources are accessed, which data needs to be extracted, extraction schedule and logic, extraction rules and the temporary storage (staging). Once data is extracted, it needs to be processed as per the business need prior to loading it in target system. Here the testing should be done to check the transformation process outcome  like combination or splitting of data fields, format changes, data unit conversion, selecting records based on particular rules, aggregation of data (summing, counting etc) and so on.  Load phase loads data into a target database, generally a Data warehouse. Testing also needs to be conducted to check the load results.

This data is then presented to different users in the form of different reports using Business Intelligence tools. What needs to be tested in these reports, we will see in next post.


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